I'm dutch and I don't know the word 'kill' or anything that sounds like it, and means 'fresh water channel'. Also I don't know any dutch cities that have 'kill' or 'kil' in their name, which you'd expect if this were true. I actually think your explanation is BS.
Seriously though, the idea of subliminal messages in adware etc. might not be that far-fetched, if worked out better. Imagine adware that subtly projects 99.5% translucent stuff over your desktop for very short periods, maybe fading it in and out just so you wont consiously notice it.... Or maybe just a 200 pixel Coca-Cola sign in an unused corner of the screen. Im not so sure its impossible...
For specialized rendering tasks, a CPU isn't even close to a GPU.
Not yet, no. But I wasn't thinking about Pentiums or Opterons anyway, but CPU's with highly specialized vector units. As a lot of 3D rasterization work lends itself very well for parallellization a number of these vector units could approach GPU performance in some parts of the rendering pipeline. For those parts that do not map to vector-code well, a more general-purpose core can be used to tie the vector-based pipeline stages together. A cell CPU with its PowerPC controller and configurable number of vector units looks might be very well-suited for such tasks.
By the way, you are right about GPU performance: nu current AMD/Intel CPU even comes near current GPU's on typical GPU tasks (not even within 1 or 2 percent for such tasks). But thats because they're really general-purpose processors, and not designed for these tasks at all. But turning this argument around: a current GPU, doesn't even come within the 1/100ths of percents of real general purpose CPU tasks. GPU's only perform on highly specialized tasks, and although its possible to 'simulate' a few general-purpose tasks on a GPU reasonably efficiently, this is not true for most of them...
If you'd ask me a hybrid general-purpose CPU with a configurable number of vector units could combine the best of 2 worlds, and obsolete specialized GPU's in the future...
This makes sense, and I've been saying this since details about designs like the Cell processor were announced. Not specifically for raytracing, but also for normal 3D rasterization. In time, I predict GPU's will disappear entirely, and CG will move back to software rendering. Most people find this ridiculous as they only remember software rendering from Quake 2-generation engines, and software rendering looked awful compared to hardware rendering back then. But there is no reason at all why a CPU couldn't produce the exact same quality rendering as a GPU, its just too expensive at the moment.
Think about it: if a Cell-like CPU with N cores can be programmed efficiently to use (e.g) N/4 cores for rendering, and be able to scale image (AA/filtering/NURBs tesselation/etc) quality with the number of cores, and have enough power left for physics and logic, what's the future for GPU's? If the solution is slower then a current GPU, the number of cores will grow eventually and at one moment surpass GPU performance. At that point software rendering would be more attractive then hardware rendering, as it is much more flexible/upgradable and scalable than a (more or less) fixed-function GPU. For example you wouldn't need special/extra hardware to be able to play both software rendered as well as software raytraced games, as both just run on some of the CPU's cores.
This is the way it has to be. To use the extreme example, if I'm charged with murder, and I can get away with it by destroying evidence, then the penalty for destorying the evidence that would have proved I was guilty should be a guilty verdict for murder. Otherwise it makes no sense NOT to destroy the evidence and take the lighter penalty for evidence destruction.
Murder != downloading some frickin' songs from the internet (though **AA likes to make it look like that). Also, to be convicted of murder (which by law has to be without reasonable doubt) generally requires evidence that cannot be destroyed by suspects anyway.
What I don't get of this whole situation is how it is even possible to be accused of downloading copyright material and be able to destroy the evidence after the judicial process is already set in motion. I would expect the PC with the allegedly pirated songs be seized for analysis the moment this woman was accused of pirating. If illegal songs were actually on the machine, why on earth did she have access to it before the case was either settled or closed? That's like leaving the scene of an unsolved crime unattended, including already established evidence...
So basically he took a GPS unit and did distance / time, then checked this against a used defined speed. How novel...
Seeing that PDA's with GPS receivers and hackable/programmable satnav systems are already available for years, I fail to see why this is so special. A lot of cars even record trip speeds in the onboard computer anyway
Also, kids under 18 shouldn't be driving anyway (like it is in the rest of the world), and above 18 they are supposed to be responsible enough not to need parental monitoring and control for such things anyway.
There's no reason gas has to reach $5/gal. If America (and yes, it pretty much HAS to be America that leads here, no one else has that rare combination of extensive agricultural, vast industrial power, and a free market that's willing to work with the government on super-projects) were to get really serious about producing biopetrol and biodiesel [..]
Re:Not even funny anymore
on
The Hybrid Scooter
·
· Score: 2, Informative
So does Finland and many other nations around the world.
I always found it rather amusing the way people in the US bitched about "high" fuel prices. BOO HOO.
This morning here in Tampere,Finland the price was 1.42 EUR/l for 95 octane (6.843 USD/gal for SI-unit impaired).
Just FYI, in The Netherlands 95 octane already goes for over 1.50 EUR/litre. A full tank for my car (which needs 98 octane) costs almost 70 EUR:-/. So I totally agree, except that 'amusing' might not be the exact words I'd use, 'pitiful' would be more appropriate. Considering the gasoline usage of an average American is almost three times more than the average American (as I've read sometime), it does annoy me the US keeps whining about gas prices...
Now all we need is some form of DRM that makes you pay every time you read the lyrics, or someone reads them to you. And then some lawsuits for people that steal the lyrics by transcripting, storing or sharing them with others... Because we all know you just cannot remember and or write down stuff you hear on television or radio, or even worse, save other people the hassle of having to write them down themselves...
It's 'bout time them lyrics-stealing pirate bastards start paying for their criminal behaviour...
Seriously, my PIII laptop has 'Designed for Windows 98' on it, and can run Windows 2000 and Windows XP just fine [linuxvirus.net], but the mainstream Linux distros are too bloaty to even install: the Ubuntu and Fedora installers literally hang, and SUSE and Mandriva are too slow even on my other machine in the +2GHz range.
Seriously, you should check your hardware and configuration dude...
I'v been running Ubuntu breezy on a 333Mhz laptop with 256M just fine, and it's notably faster than XP on the same machine. Not to say XP is slow or unusable on that machine, but if your average Linux distro runs worse on the same hardware then XP, there's something wrong with your configuration...
What a useless article, the only section that actually mentioned Linux at all was
Silver still believes that some users may decide to switch to Linux instead of upgrading to XP but he said existing applications that require Windows are likely to stop a mass migration.
So how exactly is MS killing '98 support going to 'help linux migration'??
>i>2. Vista has to run on a near infinite combination of hardware. OS X has to work on a very controlled set. This alone will make coding and testing a hellish experience.
That makes it harder for driver writers, but not much more. When windows talks to hardware, it doesn't really talk to hardware. It talks to drivers, and drivers talk to hardware. Since all the windows drivers have the seem interface, it really doesn't matter what hardware you run it on, as long as the drivers you write implement the interface correctly. Since MS already has the drivers from old versions of windows, it should be fairly simple to rework them to use the new interface; unless there are major changes in driver-OS interaction (and there really shouldn't be - they've had time enough to get it right) it shouldn't be too time-consuming even to do that.
Also, OS X runs on both x86 and ppc hardware, and different macs can have very different hardware. Plus it contains emulators to run PPC binaries on Intel and Mac Classic applications on both PPC and Intel OS X. I'd say that's quite an accomplishment as well, and MS could probably learn a lot from Apple how they managed to switch architectures so smoothly...
He writes that Boot Camp is really just a plan to get Windows users to convert to OS X."
It worked for me... I bought a core duo iMac, though I was used to Windows and Linux as a primary home and work OS, respectively. But i really liked the design and the level of hardware integration of the iMac, so I went for it anyway.
When Boot Camp was released as a beta a few days later I was really excited, especially as it was a vendor-supported dual-boot solution, and I was still using a reasonable number of Windows-only applications and games on a daily basis.
Now I have a native Windows XP install that runs great, just as if I was running normal x86 hardware, and it sucks ass compared to the OS X environment running on the same hardware... I actually booted XP a few times just after I installed it, but now I'm considering removing it altogether, because it annoys me within 5 minutes of using it.
Note that this is someone speaking who never used OS X before and used Linux as his primary home OS. Now I'd choose OS X over *any* OS for desktop usage...
Secret Cinema, the Cult/Arthouse torrent site -- http://www.secret-cinema.com/ [secret-cinema.com] -- has been doing the same thing for almost a year now, but instead of inserting a clause into their ToS and threatening to ban people, they simply ask nicely that users don't block their ads.
Well that's mighty considerate of them... Asking politely to not block their ads so they can cover their expenses hosting torrents of pirated content...
What a relief to know that we can expect the same browsing experience and constant level of quality from IE7 as we were accustomed to with IE6! Even though they completely re-engineered the whole browser with all these innovative new features and overhauled the security model of the browser/OS integration!
Why is this modded 'insightful'? This might have been the case 10 years ago, but there's direct rendering in the drivers for most chipsets generally used for gaming nowadays you know... Except for the Nvidia chipsets but their closed-source drivers implement their own direct-rendering subsystem and are actually benchmarked faster than the Windows drivers... If vender support would be a little better (especially from ATI) then Linux would actually be a better 3D/gaming platform than Windows.
Also, there's projects like DirectFB, Mesa Solo and whatnot for direct graphics without X... And wrappers around that like SDL that work seamlessly between X/non-X...
Well, like George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel already said, the only thing we can learn from history is that people learn nothing from history... Pretty sad, but true.
Beatles-Beatles is the solid, undeniable, irrefutable proof that the Slashdot editor system is broken. While great submissions are tossed daily, Beatles-Beatles is allowed to continue to abuse his articles on Slashdot to increase his Google PageRank.
Uhm... It's not his article, is it? And I actually found it pretty interesting, so how's that for 'abuse'? Wouldn't have read this article if it wasn't posted here so what's the real problem, apart from the link behind his username??
Blame it on JUnit. Since it provides a way to make unit testing easier, it's easier to get people to actually do it.
DUnit does exactly the same for Delphi, we are using it at my workplace together with a somewhat more advanced automated testing framework built around it. Works very nicely I have to admit, setting up test cases and collections takes only a few minutes for a new class. Throw in a test-driven XP development model and the result is a very dynamic and flexible development cycle, yet with a very high level of code quality and a significantly reduced number of 'obvious bugs' that manifested themselves every now and then before we starting using this approach.
Still, I doubt there are many Delphi developers who work this way... They should, seriously...
Slashdot Mirror
"Kill" means "Fresh Water Channel" in Dutch.
I'm dutch and I don't know the word 'kill' or anything that sounds like it, and means 'fresh water channel'. Also I don't know any dutch cities that have 'kill' or 'kil' in their name, which you'd expect if this were true. I actually think your explanation is BS.
Very impressive...
Seriously though, the idea of subliminal messages in adware etc. might not be that far-fetched, if worked out better. Imagine adware that subtly projects 99.5% translucent stuff over your desktop for very short periods, maybe fading it in and out just so you wont consiously notice it.... Or maybe just a 200 pixel Coca-Cola sign in an unused corner of the screen. Im not so sure its impossible...
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Just hold the mute button on the keyboard while booting. Voila, problem solved...
Replacing 'the sound file' like some people suggest is impossible I think. AFAIK the sound comes from ROM.
For specialized rendering tasks, a CPU isn't even close to a GPU.
Not yet, no. But I wasn't thinking about Pentiums or Opterons anyway, but CPU's with highly specialized vector units. As a lot of 3D rasterization work lends itself very well for parallellization a number of these vector units could approach GPU performance in some parts of the rendering pipeline. For those parts that do not map to vector-code well, a more general-purpose core can be used to tie the vector-based pipeline stages together. A cell CPU with its PowerPC controller and configurable number of vector units looks might be very well-suited for such tasks.
By the way, you are right about GPU performance: nu current AMD/Intel CPU even comes near current GPU's on typical GPU tasks (not even within 1 or 2 percent for such tasks). But thats because they're really general-purpose processors, and not designed for these tasks at all. But turning this argument around: a current GPU, doesn't even come within the 1/100ths of percents of real general purpose CPU tasks. GPU's only perform on highly specialized tasks, and although its possible to 'simulate' a few general-purpose tasks on a GPU reasonably efficiently, this is not true for most of them...
If you'd ask me a hybrid general-purpose CPU with a configurable number of vector units could combine the best of 2 worlds, and obsolete specialized GPU's in the future...
This makes sense, and I've been saying this since details about designs like the Cell processor were announced. Not specifically for raytracing, but also for normal 3D rasterization. In time, I predict GPU's will disappear entirely, and CG will move back to software rendering. Most people find this ridiculous as they only remember software rendering from Quake 2-generation engines, and software rendering looked awful compared to hardware rendering back then. But there is no reason at all why a CPU couldn't produce the exact same quality rendering as a GPU, its just too expensive at the moment.
Think about it: if a Cell-like CPU with N cores can be programmed efficiently to use (e.g) N/4 cores for rendering, and be able to scale image (AA/filtering/NURBs tesselation/etc) quality with the number of cores, and have enough power left for physics and logic, what's the future for GPU's? If the solution is slower then a current GPU, the number of cores will grow eventually and at one moment surpass GPU performance. At that point software rendering would be more attractive then hardware rendering, as it is much more flexible/upgradable and scalable than a (more or less) fixed-function GPU. For example you wouldn't need special/extra hardware to be able to play both software rendered as well as software raytraced games, as both just run on some of the CPU's cores.
This is the way it has to be. To use the extreme example, if I'm charged with murder, and I can get away with it by destroying evidence, then the penalty for destorying the evidence that would have proved I was guilty should be a guilty verdict for murder. Otherwise it makes no sense NOT to destroy the evidence and take the lighter penalty for evidence destruction.
Murder != downloading some frickin' songs from the internet (though **AA likes to make it look like that). Also, to be convicted of murder (which by law has to be without reasonable doubt) generally requires evidence that cannot be destroyed by suspects anyway.
What I don't get of this whole situation is how it is even possible to be accused of downloading copyright material and be able to destroy the evidence after the judicial process is already set in motion. I would expect the PC with the allegedly pirated songs be seized for analysis the moment this woman was accused of pirating. If illegal songs were actually on the machine, why on earth did she have access to it before the case was either settled or closed? That's like leaving the scene of an unsolved crime unattended, including already established evidence...
So basically he took a GPS unit and did distance / time, then checked this against a used defined speed. How novel...
Seeing that PDA's with GPS receivers and hackable/programmable satnav systems are already available for years, I fail to see why this is so special. A lot of cars even record trip speeds in the onboard computer anyway
Also, kids under 18 shouldn't be driving anyway (like it is in the rest of the world), and above 18 they are supposed to be responsible enough not to need parental monitoring and control for such things anyway.
What if I don't want my box connected to the Internet when I'm not playing games?
Uhmmm... Turn off the console?
Considering the gasoline usage of an average American is almost three times more than the average American
Substitute European for 2nd occurence of American ofcourse...
There's no reason gas has to reach $5/gal. If America (and yes, it pretty much HAS to be America that leads here, no one else has that rare combination of extensive agricultural, vast industrial power, and a free market that's willing to work with the government on super-projects) were to get really serious about producing biopetrol and biodiesel [..]
It does not HAVE to be the US that leads in Biodiesel.
So does Finland and many other nations around the world.
:-/. So I totally agree, except that 'amusing' might not be the exact words I'd use, 'pitiful' would be more appropriate. Considering the gasoline usage of an average American is almost three times more than the average American (as I've read sometime), it does annoy me the US keeps whining about gas prices...
I always found it rather amusing the way people in the US bitched about "high" fuel prices.
BOO HOO.
This morning here in Tampere,Finland the price was 1.42 EUR/l for 95 octane (6.843 USD/gal for SI-unit impaired).
Just FYI, in The Netherlands 95 octane already goes for over 1.50 EUR/litre. A full tank for my car (which needs 98 octane) costs almost 70 EUR
Now all we need is some form of DRM that makes you pay every time you read the lyrics, or someone reads them to you. And then some lawsuits for people that steal the lyrics by transcripting, storing or sharing them with others... Because we all know you just cannot remember and or write down stuff you hear on television or radio, or even worse, save other people the hassle of having to write them down themselves...
It's 'bout time them lyrics-stealing pirate bastards start paying for their criminal behaviour...
Seriously, my PIII laptop has 'Designed for Windows 98' on it, and can run Windows 2000 and Windows XP just fine [linuxvirus.net], but the mainstream Linux distros are too bloaty to even install: the Ubuntu and Fedora installers literally hang, and SUSE and Mandriva are too slow even on my other machine in the +2GHz range.
Seriously, you should check your hardware and configuration dude...
I'v been running Ubuntu breezy on a 333Mhz laptop with 256M just fine, and it's notably faster than XP on the same machine. Not to say XP is slow or unusable on that machine, but if your average Linux distro runs worse on the same hardware then XP, there's something wrong with your configuration...
What a useless article, the only section that actually mentioned Linux at all was
Silver still believes that some users may decide to switch to Linux instead of upgrading to XP but he said existing applications that require Windows are likely to stop a mass migration.
So how exactly is MS killing '98 support going to 'help linux migration'??
>i>2. Vista has to run on a near infinite combination of hardware. OS X has to work on a very controlled set. This alone will make coding and testing a hellish experience.
That makes it harder for driver writers, but not much more. When windows talks to hardware, it doesn't really talk to hardware. It talks to drivers, and drivers talk to hardware. Since all the windows drivers have the seem interface, it really doesn't matter what hardware you run it on, as long as the drivers you write implement the interface correctly. Since MS already has the drivers from old versions of windows, it should be fairly simple to rework them to use the new interface; unless there are major changes in driver-OS interaction (and there really shouldn't be - they've had time enough to get it right) it shouldn't be too time-consuming even to do that.
Also, OS X runs on both x86 and ppc hardware, and different macs can have very different hardware. Plus it contains emulators to run PPC binaries on Intel and Mac Classic applications on both PPC and Intel OS X. I'd say that's quite an accomplishment as well, and MS could probably learn a lot from Apple how they managed to switch architectures so smoothly...
He writes that Boot Camp is really just a plan to get Windows users to convert to OS X."
... I actually booted XP a few times just after I installed it, but now I'm considering removing it altogether, because it annoys me within 5 minutes of using it.
It worked for me... I bought a core duo iMac, though I was used to Windows and Linux as a primary home and work OS, respectively. But i really liked the design and the level of hardware integration of the iMac, so I went for it anyway.
When Boot Camp was released as a beta a few days later I was really excited, especially as it was a vendor-supported dual-boot solution, and I was still using a reasonable number of Windows-only applications and games on a daily basis.
Now I have a native Windows XP install that runs great, just as if I was running normal x86 hardware, and it sucks ass compared to the OS X environment running on the same hardware
Note that this is someone speaking who never used OS X before and used Linux as his primary home OS. Now I'd choose OS X over *any* OS for desktop usage...
Secret Cinema, the Cult/Arthouse torrent site -- http://www.secret-cinema.com/ [secret-cinema.com] -- has been doing the same thing for almost a year now, but instead of inserting a clause into their ToS and threatening to ban people, they simply ask nicely that users don't block their ads.
Well that's mighty considerate of them... Asking politely to not block their ads so they can cover their expenses hosting torrents of pirated content...
What a relief to know that we can expect the same browsing experience and constant level of quality from IE7 as we were accustomed to with IE6! Even though they completely re-engineered the whole browser with all these innovative new features and overhauled the security model of the browser/OS integration!
Why is this modded 'insightful'? This might have been the case 10 years ago, but there's direct rendering in the drivers for most chipsets generally used for gaming nowadays you know... Except for the Nvidia chipsets but their closed-source drivers implement their own direct-rendering subsystem and are actually benchmarked faster than the Windows drivers... If vender support would be a little better (especially from ATI) then Linux would actually be a better 3D/gaming platform than Windows.
Also, there's projects like DirectFB, Mesa Solo and whatnot for direct graphics without X... And wrappers around that like SDL that work seamlessly between X/non-X...
ntxt
Why do people not learn from history?
Well, like George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel already said, the only thing we can learn from history is that people learn nothing from history... Pretty sad, but true.
Beatles-Beatles is the solid, undeniable, irrefutable proof that the Slashdot editor system is broken. While great submissions are tossed daily, Beatles-Beatles is allowed to continue to abuse his articles on Slashdot to increase his Google PageRank.
Uhm... It's not his article, is it? And I actually found it pretty interesting, so how's that for 'abuse'? Wouldn't have read this article if it wasn't posted here so what's the real problem, apart from the link behind his username??
Blame it on JUnit. Since it provides a way to make unit testing easier, it's easier to get people to actually do it.
DUnit does exactly the same for Delphi, we are using it at my workplace together with a somewhat more advanced automated testing framework built around it. Works very nicely I have to admit, setting up test cases and collections takes only a few minutes for a new class. Throw in a test-driven XP development model and the result is a very dynamic and flexible development cycle, yet with a very high level of code quality and a significantly reduced number of 'obvious bugs' that manifested themselves every now and then before we starting using this approach.
Still, I doubt there are many Delphi developers who work this way... They should, seriously...
---
No sigs for you today
Just what linux needs a bunch of commie supporters, I dont think so.
That's about the stupidest comment I've read on Slashdot this year. Where are you from, Mars or something??